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Another year flies by very quickly. Happy 2018!
Always a useful time to sit back and think about what was achieved last year.
So I started off the year with an ambitious list of things that I wanted to achieve (note to self - *never* do that again!)
As usual I had a mixture of successes and setbacks. All of this helps contribute to both my own understanding about how to work effectively in digital preservation and hopefully the shared understanding of the wider community.
Though I...

Introduction
Digital preservation seems more like a journey than a destination. As technology changes so the processes and tools of effective preservation need to adapt and so good practice remains provisional: more accurately identified as a commitment to constant improvement than a single steady state. Never entirely certain what success looks like, the digital preservation community has over the years developed several proxies for success and maturity of service. The...

Neil Beagrie is Director of Consultancy at Charles Beagrie Ltd
Illustration by Jørgen Stamp digitalbevaring.dk CC BY 2.5 Denmark
Traditionally the major challenge in digital preservation has been seen to be technology obsolesence. However, arguably the organisational challenges, particularly funding (and advocacy for funding), have proved to be much more significant over time.
In recent years an increasing number of community efforts have focussed on helping organisations to...

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Yvonne Tunnat is Preservation Manager at the ZBW Leibniz Information Centre for Economics
I was fresh from university when I started my job as a preservation manager in October 2011 at the ZBW. Having taken a module named “Digital Preservation” during my studies of library and information science and after a 9-week-internship at the Digital Preservation Department of the university of Utah, I obviously was the best they could find for the job, although I knew next...

Carl Grant is Associate Dean/Chief Technology Officer at University of Oklahoma Libraries
It’s always one of my goals in my role, to watch emerging technologies and to try and identify those that, per the model Geoffrey Moore established, will “cross the chasm” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crossing_the_Chasm ) and have an impact in research and pedagogy. This is always a risky move. You can be totally wrong, spend a fair amount of money and have little to show at the...

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Dr. Ramesh C Gaur works at the Jawaharlal Nehru University
At the outset, let me congratulate all on initiating 30th November as the International Digital Preservation Day (IDPD17).
My introduction to digital preservation started in 2005 when I visited Germany with the support of Max Mueller Bhawan. My three-week stay, one week each at Belfield University, Belfield; German National Library Frankfurt; and State Gottingen University Library, Gottingen; provided me...

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Kasandra O’Connell is Head of the IFI Irish Film Archive in Dublin, Ireland
Dear IFI Irish Film Archive of five years ago,
I know you are filled with trepidation at the sudden need for the IFI Irish Film Archive to preserve Ireland’s digital moving image heritage alongside your analogue collections. The switch to digital formats within the film and broadcasting sector in Ireland has been sudden, encouraged by a government sponsored scheme enabling cinemas to...

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Zhenxin Wu is Professor of the Information System Department and Deputy Director of the Digital Preservation Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences at the National Science Library in Beijing, China
与长期保存共同成长的十五年
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Jaye Weatherburn is Digital Preservation Officer at the University of Melbourne
In a review conducted in 2016 for the University of Melbourne’s Digital Preservation Project, key research staff at the university were asked the question, What does digital preservation mean to you? The primary aim of this review was to identify and document gaps in service provision for research data management, and to highlight the main barriers impeding the implementation of sustainable...

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Jaye Weatherburn is Digital Preservation Officer at the University of Melbourne
Background
Three years ago, at the September 2014 meeting of Academic Board at the University of Melbourne, the Digital Preservation 2015–2025: Strategy[i] and Implementation Roadmaps[ii] were endorsed. By early 2016 the Digital Preservation Project team had formed and commenced the “Establishment phase” towards implementing the Strategy. A central aim of the Strategy is to establish a...

José Borbinha works at INESC-ID – Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) at Lisbon University, Portugal
(Episode 1) When unsuccessful digital preservation can be convenient
The year of 1998 was special. In May, it opened the Lisbon World Exposition! In June, it was held the “Sixth DELOS Workshop on Preservation of Digital Information” in the beautiful Tomar. Finally, in October, I became CIO of the National Library of Portugal.
In retrospective, 1998 was my definitive commitment with this...

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Robert Buckley works for the National Archives of the UAE in Abu Dhabi
PERSIST: A Global Dialogue on Digital Preservation
To those unfamiliar with PERSIST, it is a project within the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme, whose International Advisory Committee is currently chaired by Dr. Abdulla Alraisi, Director General of the National Archives of the UAE. The Memory of the World (MoW) Programme was created in 1992 to facilitate preservation of the world’s...

Nick Thomas-Symonds MP is co-Chair of the All-Party Group on Archives and History for UK Parliament.
This blog post is the text for a speech delivered by Nick Thomas-Symonds MP on 30 November 2017 at a RecordDNA event at Westminster.
As Co-Chair of the All Parliamentary Archives Group I am delighted to open this event, which is being held on International Digital Preservation Day. Delighted also to welcome such an impressive range of speakers. Let me start by thanking...

Leslie Johnston is Director of Digital Preservation for the National Archives and Records Administration in Washington DC, USA
One of the greatest challenge for any archive is the multiplicity of file formats. For the United States National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), with several decades of history accessioning and managing electronic records, this is compounded. We received our first transfer of electronic records in 1970!
How do you plan a preservation strategy...

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Andrea Goethals works at the National Library of New Zealand
Recently I unexpectedly found myself with extra time on my hands, as I was preparing to take a new position halfway around the world. Like most of you, I’m assuming, I normally don’t get the time to go back and reread some of my favorite digital preservation papers, discover new favorites I missed previously, or to follow the sourced papers to see where it takes me. Because my interests lie in what it...

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Eld Zierau is Digital Preservation Specialist PhD at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen, Denmark
And yes, it does involve technology, but technology is just a tool, in the same way as a word processing editor is a tool for a writer.
Today, there is a growing awareness of the need for bit preservation, but there are still a lot of talk about backup, hardware longevity, bit preservation as a technology solution etc. I will here focus on the technology...

Read Louise Lawson's account of Ingrid Dillo's key note session on FAIR and Open Data at iPRES 2017. Louise is attending iPRES 2017 with support from the DPC's Leadership Programme which is generously funded by our Commericial Supporters.

The ICSU World Data System (ICSU-WDS) and the Data Seal of Approval (DSA) are pleased to announce the launch of a new certification organization: CoreTrustSeal.
The CoreTrustSeal Board offers all interested data repositories a core-level certification based on the DSA–WDS Core Trustworthy Data Repositories Requirements catalogue and procedures. CoreTrustSeal Data Repository certification replaces the DSA certification and the WDS certification of Regular Members.

Introduction
High-performing and tightly integrated organisations can sometimes suffer from inertia, even when processes are well understood and benefits or risks are immediate. So given that digital preservation processes are sometimes poorly understood and benefits or risks deferred, it’s perhaps not a surprise that making progress in digital preservation can seem hard. Historically the lack of tools was a significant constraint to digital preservation: but as new tools and...

Over the last 18 months I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to reflect, research, and synthesise with colleagues, what we have learnt about costs and benefits from digital curation and preservation. The results are now published in a cost-benefit advocacy toolkit released by the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA).
It was a small project focussed on the needs of social science data archives but much of what it has done will be of interest to anyone involved...

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